


someday my pain will mark you (harness your blame)

by ohmytheon



Category: Justified
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Daemons, Daemons, F/M, Gen, His Dark Materials - Freeform, Other
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-13
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2017-12-26 10:46:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 13,228
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/965038
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ohmytheon/pseuds/ohmytheon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You don’t trust people based on their soul, but you sure as hell judge them.</p><p>And every man and woman in his entire adult life that has seen Raylan Givens walk into a room, hat tipped down just enough to shade his eyes, gun holstered at his waist, Marshal’s badge gleaming on his side, knows to take a step back when they catch a sight of his Aella. You don’t want to bother a U.S. Deputy Marshall with a propensity to shoot and kill the people that try pulling on him.</p><p>But you just don’t fuck with a man that has a foreboding black wolf daemon at his left.</p><p>(Justified and scenes from before the show - but with daemons!)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. part one

**Author's Note:**

> So most of the AUs with daemons also tag the actual series, but I'm still unsure of how to tag things and I don't want to get in trouble, so I'll just stick with Justified. This is my first and likely to be only fic of this series, but I love it something fierce. I've only seen up to half of season 3, so I apologize for any canon discrepancies or OOC tendencies. I'm trying to keep that to a minimum. I think I spent more time looking up names for daemons than actually writing this. I don't know how long it will be. This is kind of like an writing exercise for me. And I'm loving every second of it. The title was taken from Bon Iver's song "The Wolves (Act I & II)".
> 
> Also, this was completely inspired by zihna's work on here "i followed fires" - my all-time favorite fanfic that is The Walking Dead retold with daemons. It's absolutely perfect and beautiful so go read it!

  
**someday my pain will mark you (harness your blame)**   
_part one_   


No one ever says that there’s a common theme about people in law enforcement and what their daemons settle as.

But there’s a goddamn common theme about people in law enforcement and what their daemons settle as.

Dollars to doughnuts, you spot a person sporting a badge or a gun on their side; they’ve got some sort of dog daemon trailing behind them, tongue lolling out innocently or teeth gleaming ferociously. There’s something painfully stereotypical about a law enforcement officer and their dog daemon, but it happens all the time. Even more so, the type of dog seems somewhat determined by what type of law enforcement a person ends up joining. A lot of local and state cops with German shepherds, ATF agents with bloodhounds, SWAT with Doberman pinchers… The list goes on and on.

Of course it varies. There’s that random ass FBI agent with a fucking poodle daemon. Like hell you want to be in the NSA with Jack Russell terrier. He once knew a detective with a Welsh corgi daemon. Strangest thing though. It’s like the daemon knows shit the person doesn’t know about their future. A kid’s daemon settles as a dog at ten, twelve, fourteen years of age – and then ten years later they’re wearing a badge or prison blues.

Because of course not everyone with a dog daemon joins law enforcement. It’s strange how many people whose daemons settle as dogs take a completely opposite turn and end up behind bars. Dopey dogs, vicious dogs, rabid-looking dogs, and a few wild-eyed coyotes – a lot of convicts end up with daemons like that.

His father’s daemon is a Rottweiler named Mara. As a kid, he was so terrified of that massive snarling mess that he and his Aella would hide in the closet whenever his father was too far into his cups. Sure his mother protected him most of the time, but there was only so much her orange tabby cat daemon could do to protect Aella from Mara. She was wild and crazed, just like his father, and sometimes she’d tear into Aella so hard that her pain made him cry out. He’d get smacked for that, told off for crying like a little sissy, and Aella would rub up against his shiner as a black cat while he smoothed her fur down.

Dogs are thought to be good creatures, nice animals. There’s all that saying about how dogs are man’s best friend and they show loyalty and are good through and through. Maybe the animals are like that, but daemons are different.

Daemons are souls and souls aren’t all that good in the world. He knows this firsthand – seen it with his own eyes as a kid and now as an adult. Being in law enforcement allows you to see people and their daemons at their very worst, turns you cynical as all get out, makes you not able to trust anymore, even if they’ve got a golden Labrador daemon, even if their daemon is a rabbit. A specific daemon doesn’t mean a person is good or bad. He’s met people with awful-looking daemons that are genuinely nice and kind and people with sweet-looking daemons that will gut you like a fish without a second thought.

You don’t trust people based on their soul, but you sure as hell judge them.

And every man and woman in his entire adult life that has seen Raylan Givens walk into a room, hat tipped down just enough to shade his eyes, gun holstered at his waist, Marshal’s badge gleaming on his side, knows to take a step back when they catch a sight of his Aella. You don’t want to bother a U.S. Deputy Marshall with a propensity to shoot and kill the people that try pulling on him.

But you just don’t fuck with a man that has a foreboding black wolf daemon at his left.

\- - - - -

The first time he steps into the Miami office, people actually take a step back. He sees Chief Deputy Dan Grant stand up in his office, probably hissing a “shit” under his breath, and a few other Marshalls cast him disbelieving glances.

 _What kind of officer of the law’s got a fucking wolf daemon?_ he can practically hear them thinking.

 _A damn good one,_ Aella responds as she pads next to him fearlessly.

He’s always loved Aella for that. The moment she settled, all the fear in her was erased and his vanished into thin air. No longer was he the boy afraid of getting hit by his father or the boy that ran just a bit faster than all the others after school so he wouldn’t get beat on for mouthing off to them. He didn’t run away anymore. He stood his ground and dared anyone to come at him, Aella snarling at his side. She grew as he grew and people learned to be wary of him just as much as they were of her.

Almost playfully, Aella snaps her jaw at a convict handcuffed in a chair. The man lets out a yelp and jumps back so hard that he falls out of his chair, shouting, “Keep that thing away from me!” His little rat daemon ducks back into his shirt, squeaking so loud that it sounds like a squeaky toy being chewed on.

“Glynco warned me about you,” is the first thing Grant says to him by way of greeting, his bobcat daemon swishing her tail inquisitively at his right.

All Raylan can do is shrug his shoulders to that. Unlike the dog daemons of most law enforcement officers, Aella does not sit respectfully at Raylan’s left side. She doesn’t heel like a trained pup. Instead she walks around the office, far as she can go, and investigates the place on her own. All of the other people’s daemons stay out of her sight. They’ll come out eventually, but for now, the place is hers. He can feel the tug deep inside of him as she strays further and further, but refuses to show it. If she doesn’t like this place, then they won’t stay, simple as that, and she makes her judgments just as quick as he does.

“With all due respect, I just came here to work,” Raylan finally says.

Grant snorts and starts back for his office. “I heard how you ‘work.’”

And that’s it. Raylan goes to his assigned desk and sits down just as Aella walks back up to him. Her head his held high, bright blue eyes shining, and even her shoulders look set back, as if she’s walking straight like a man in the Marines. He still can’t tell whether she’s yet to get out of the habit or if she just like walking around like she’s the leader of the pack.

 _Between you and me, we both know I’m the leader,_ Aella tells him cheerfully.

Raylan just smiles in return and starts to set up his computer while Aella presses her front paws against the window and looks attentively out at their new surroundings, tongue hanging out just so slightly. She’s a wolf through and through, but she knows that she has to make people comfortable. And it’s easy to make people comfortable when you act like something you’re not. Law enforcement officers like dogs, and so even though she can’t pass as a dog in looks for shit these days, she can act like one pretty convincingly.

\- - - - -

It’s Raylan’s idea to dig coal. He hates the thought of it, hates the smell of coal, hates the flames that lick it, hates the dark and the small spaces, but he likes money and it pays better than most jobs in Harlan County. When he talks it over with Aella, he’s already set on it, but he likes getting her opinion. When she tells him that it’s a dumbass idea, he nods his head, agrees with her, but fills out the application anyways. All he wants to do is get out of this godforsaken town, but he kind of needs money to do that.

Now Raylan has known Boyd Crowder all his life. They’ve gotten into scraps before, stuck together like glue against the other boys without meaning to be, and a lot of the time they’d been in the same classes as well. Boyd always got into trouble, probably from the time he was born. Raylan was no star student as a kid, sitting in the corner of the classroom dreaming over better days with Aella sleeping under his feet in gentle collie form, but he’d at least been a deal better than Boyd. That boy’s middle name was trouble and his daemon was equally mischievous.

Raylan could remember every time that Boyd was called into the principal’s office or his father was forced to come pick him up from school, Boyd’s daemon would shift into the most innocuous thing ever. There was Boyd, hair sticking all up, an innocent look on his dirty face, and he’d be clinging to a rabbit daemon or a field mouse or a kitten or a sweet little bird. “I didn’t do nothin’,” he’d insist as they dragged him out of the room.

But of course Raylan knew better. He knew that Boyd was guilty of everything he was accused of. It was a goddamn miracle the boy graduated. Then again, it was a miracle that Raylan had too. While Boyd just stopped showing up to school or was busy slinging drugs, Raylan just didn’t give two licks and Aella hadn’t cared to motivate him much either. Being cramped up in a building in a small room with too many other kids and their tame daemons did not fit a wolf at all.

He meets up with Boyd again in the coal mines, covered in soot from head-to-toe. Even his daemon is dirty. It’s almost impossible to spot the red in the fox’s fur; she’s so dirty. Still, Boyd grins and his white teeth gleam through the dark. “Raylan, that you?”

“Hullo, Boyd.”

Boyd reaches out a gloved hand and they shake. Shaking a man’s hand can tell you a lot about the person as long as you pay attention – the way they shake, how hard they grip your hand, how long they prolong eye contact. Boyd’s handshake is firm, strong, and he never looks away.

(Looking away is a show of subservience.)

“Well shit, I didn’t figure I’d find you in these mines,” Boyd laughs as they walk back to the surface together.

“To be honest, I didn’t either,” Raylan replies.

“None of us ever do.” Boyd takes his glasses off and rubs them on his shirt, but it only manages to smudge the dirt on them even more and make them more useless. “I wouldn’t have even recognized you if it wasn’t for your daemon. A man can spot you a million miles away with a daemon like that.”

He’s right, of course. No other person in Harlan County has a wolf daemon, not even the hardest of criminals. Every man, child, and woman knows that Boyd’s father Bo runs most of the crime here, and he’s got nasty old pit-bull daemon to prove it.

Behind them, their daemons fool around with each other. Boyd’s fox daemon nips at Aella’s ankles while she leaps gracefully out of the way. Aella could easily break the fox with one bite – she could do that with most daemons – but she knows how to play well. Most daemons tend to find her too intimidating to rough house with, but Boyd’s fox has always been up for it. For the life of him, Raylan can’t remember her name, though he’s known Boyd for his entire life. Makes him feel a little dumb when he’s almost certain that Boyd can remember Aella’s name. He knows that Aella knows, but she won’t tell him. She never tells him a person’s daemons name, makes him beg for it or find out from the person themselves. Little shit, she is sometimes.

Raylan glances back at their daemons just as they walk into the sunlight. “I guess we do sort of stand out.”

“It’s a little more difficult down in the mines,” Boyd concedes, “what with her being black as night. Takes ages to get the dirt and soot out of Atha.”

Athaliah, that’s what his daemon’s name was. Something akin to a grin splits onto the fox’s face. “You could be dirty as hell and no one would know the difference,” she tells the wolf.

Aella shakes once, dust blowing off of her coat in a little cloud. “At least I’m not as dirty as you.”

“Still the same old, same old.” Boyd rubs at his watch on his wrist and gives it a quick look. “What say you we get a drink?”

“It’s only lunch break,” Raylan points out. “We still have to go back in there.”

Boyd starts for the parking lot and turns around, the same fox-like grin on his face, Athaliah bouncing lightly on her feet at his heels. “Why do you think I suggested a drink?” he says with a laugh. “C’mon, stickler, I’ve got a shot of bourbon with your name on it.”

Raylan goes to look back at Aella, but she’s already in front of him, halfway in between him and Crowder. She tilts her head at him, looking more like a dog than a wolf for a second, and he can feel her desire tugging him forward to head in Boyd’s direction. It’s no secret that neither of them is particularly fond of most people in Harlan County and there are even fewer daemons that Aella actually likes. But she likes Boyd’s sneaky, little fox daemon, he knows that much. She’s quick to fire back and will tumble in the dirt despite being considerably smaller.

He’s eighteen. He doesn’t know any better. He hates this shithole town and pretty much everyone in it.

But Crowder, for all his antics and wild nature, he’s alright.

“What else are we gonna do?” Aella says as they hurry to catch up with Boyd. “S’not like you brought food for your lunch break.”

“Bourbon ain’t food,” Raylan points out.

Aella tosses her head back, some more soot coming off of her black fur. “But it’s more’n you’ve got. And I hate it down in those mines. Maybe a shot will make us both feel a little better.”

He should’ve known – Aella was right. She was always right.

\- - - - -

It’s because of Aella that he and Winona even get together in the first place.

Years after their divorce, when he’s hunkered in sunny Miami, Raylan can still recall the moment he first met his future ex-wife. He’d been testifying in a court case and there’d she been, sitting off to the side, doing her job as a court stenographer. She’d looked so fantastic that he could barely keep his mind on the task at hand, putting a man that had shot at him and killed two other people in jail. If it hadn’t been for Aella nudging him forward in his mind, he might have stopped talking altogether and stared at her.

After the trial is over, Raylan and Aella step onto the elevator, prepared to head back to the office, until Winona and her sleek daemon step inside, leaving just the four of them alone. The damn thing is so hot that Raylan is tugging on his tie like an altar boy getting caught with pot in his pockets by the priest.

Aella takes a good, long look at the other daemon and then abruptly asks, “What are you? Some kind of miniature leopard or a weird-looking housecat?”

Raylan spends the next few seconds choking on his own breath as Winona looks down in surprise. He’s only slightly relieved that she doesn’t look terrified that a wolf is asking rude questions.

“Aella,” Raylan finally manages.

But his daemon just looks up at him all naïve-like. “What? I was just asking.”

“He’s an ocelot,” Winona answers, which is strange, since people don’t really talk to other people’s daemons, not unless… Well, not unless their lovers or family or really bloody close. Raylan can count all the people that talk to Aella on two hands – and all the people Aella talks back to on one.

Raylan looks at the woman in the elevator. “You’re from Kentucky?”

The surprise is fading from her face, but this time she blushes slightly. “How can you tell?”

“Well, not many people in Salt Lake sound–”

“Like a hick?” she counters dryly.

“Now I wasn’t gonna say that,” Raylan says. He smiles sheepishly at her. “Raylan Givens.”

“I know,” she replies, a knowing smile on her own face. At first, she doesn’t say anything, like she’s not going to tell him her name. The doors open and she steps out, her ocelot daemon slipping in between her legs as she turns around. He wants to ask her what her name is, can feel Aella nudging him in his mind, but won’t open his mouth out of stubbornness. “I’m sure I’ll see you around, cowboy.”

And then the doors shut.

Aella lets out a huff. “Fuckin’ pussy.”

Raylan gives her a look. “I didn’t see you askin’ for that fancy cat daemon’s name.”

“I’m not the one actin’ like they’re in heat,” Aella points out, raising her snout up in an almost snotty manner.

\- - - - -

Everyone remembers the moment their daemon settles. You can ask a person in their nineties lying on their deathbed and they’ll recall with a broken smile that moment. It’s the one thing that even insane people remember. It’s the first time most doctors will ask a patient with head trauma or when they’ve come out of surgery after asking their name. For the most part, the day is unremarkable, is no different from the rest. It’s just one day your daemon can change shapes at the drop of a hat and the next they can’t. It’s weird shit that no one questions. But you always remember it despite the plainness of the day.

For Raylan, it’s a day that neither he nor Aella like to recall. It is unparticular from most of his childhood days, though others might beg to differ.

As a young child, he loved the way that Aella could change at any given moment. Whenever his father would come stumbling in at night, smelling of booze and growling almost as much as Mara, Aella would be able to change into something tiny as a moth and hide in his shirt. If they did get into a fight, she could change into a bird and fly away, hiding on a shelf where Mara couldn’t reach her.

He is ten years-old, a scrawny piece of shit as his father says, and he goes to bed with Aella curled partly underneath his neck and on his shoulder in a ferret form. His mother tucks him into bed, despite his insistence that he’s too old for that, but he lets her anyways. (Truth is, at his age, he wants her to tuck him into bed for the rest of his life, because then he’ll know she’s safe and alive and okay.)

“Goodnight, cowboy,” his mother says.

His mother’s daemon, Cemil, licks at Aella’s nose and then leaps off of the bed silently. His tail just narrowly misses being caught in the door as his mother shuts it.

Before he can even say goodnight to Aella, he’s out like a light, the day having exhausted him.

A few hours later, he wakes up to the muffled sound of his mother crying out in pain. Raylan’s eyes shoot open and he sits up. Aella is already at the door in a collie form. She looks back at him and even in the dark he can see the look in her eyes, knows what she’s thinking. He grips his blanket tightly, sitting completely still, when he hears his mother make the same sound again. He can even hear the smack from his father’s hand, if only in his head.

“Raylan,” Aella breathes out, her ears pinned back on her head.

He’s heard the fights before. They happen most nights when his father finds his way home after spending the night in a drunk tank or after getting collared for some petty crime or another. The next morning, he’s always apologetic to his wife, kissing her and holding her even as she sports the bruises. Raylan will watch her through a sliver of his opened door as she puts on make up to cover the bruises. He’s even been the victim of his father’s rage, tearing through the house as his mother screams for the older man to stop.

Just thinking about all the fights, about his mother getting hurt by the man she loves, the man that is his father, makes Aella whimper and tuck her tail between her legs.

He hears something glass break and that’s when he snaps. He rips the sheet from his bed and storms towards the door, jerking it open so hard that he nearly knocks himself in the face.

Raylan can feel Aella’s hesitance to jump into the middle of the argument pulling back on him. Truth be told, now that he’s out of his room and can hear the shouts even more, he would like nothing more than to crawl back into his bed, hide under the blankets, press his pillow over his head, and pretend that he can’t hear a thing. But this is his mother and he feels sick to his stomach to hear her hurt. He can feel it in his bones, aching in a way no child’s should, and he can feel Aella hurt as she thinks about Cemil’s torn ear and messed up paw.

Fumbling his way down the stairs, Raylan makes his way through the house until the screams are almost too much to bear. Screams of, “Raylan is sleeping – just calm down!” and “Don’t tell me what to do, woman!” and “I’ll tell you what to do when you’re acting like a wild dog!” take him in the direction of the living room.

His father loves his mother, he keeps telling himself. _Dad loves Mom. He just don’t know how to show it._ Or at least that’s what his mother always told him.

 _Careful,_ Aella says from behind, her nose bumping into the back of his already wobbly legs.

It shouldn’t surprise him, what he sees. It shouldn’t really scare him or shock him. He’s seen his father hit his mother before. He’s seen what sort of violence his father is capable of. Knows the man is nothing good but a bastard that knows how to screw people over.

But when he sees his father Arlo holding his mother Francis by the throat, pressing her up against the wall, and Mara damn near chomping down on Cemil, well– Something explodes inside of him, something _shatters_ and reassembles itself inside of him into something solid and cold and hard.

“Let go of her, you bastard!” Raylan howls at the top of his lungs, shooting across the room and throwing himself at his much larger father.

In that same moment, Aella, little border collie Aella, sweet Aella, kind Aella, sensible much smarter Aella, reclusive and quiet Aella, turns into a big black wolf mid-air and thuds so hard into Mara that the Rottweiler flies into the coffee table and breaks it.

Maybe it’s the sight of his son’s once cowering daemon’s jaws shut tight on his own daemon or maybe it’s Raylan himself who is punching and kicking as hard as he can, but Arlo lets go of Francis and he stumbles to the side and falls to the ground. Raylan doesn’t relent. He’s on top of his father in a second, pounding on him, screaming curses at him, using up every last bit of anger and resentment that he’s held in his heart for a whole decade. Aella is even more relentless. Mara puts up a good fight, being slightly larger, but Aella is vicious and all wild. There’s not a tame bone on her body, not like in Mara, and her snout is already covered in blood.

Arlo manages to get up just enough to knock Raylan to the side and he tumbles into the fireplace, his head smacking into the brick. “You little piece of shit!” the man snarls, rearing a hand back to smack him into another county.

He doesn’t get the chance though. Aella bites into Arlo’s arm and jerks him back onto the ground, startling everyone in the room.

“Aella!” Cemil gasps out.

Raylan experiences something very strange in his dazed state. He’s slumped against the wall, watching the whole thing happen, watching Aella drag his father into the next room, and he feels the painful tug as she puts more distance in between them – but then he feels her teeth digging into cloth and flesh, can taste his father’s own blood in his mouth, can feel her heart racing as manically as his. For a few seconds, he’s not Raylan but Aella and she’s cold and firm and set in her ways.

Aella spits out Arlo’s arm and the man falls and clutches his bloody arm. Mara limps over to him and licks his face, as Francis and Cemil stand back in horror. Baring her teeth, she snarls, “Don’t you ever lay a hand on Raylan again or I’ll rip your throat out.”

While everyone stands in shock at what has just happened, Aella turns on her heels and walks straight towards Raylan. She pushes against him, letting him dig his hands into her black fur, until he’s back on his feet. He keeps holding onto her, feeling unsteady and strangely firm at the same time. When he looks her in the eyes – blue eyes, bright like a sunny day sky – he knows in his bones that she’s done. She’s done with everything – all this shit, all this hollering, the petty crime his father does, the drinking, everything.

 _I won’t let him hurt you ever again,_ Aella tells him with those eyes of hers.

And she’s wild, so wild, so untamable and crazed with rage. She’s got blood almost dripping from her teeth, but she gently licks the blood away from the back of his head. He can feel it in himself too, this wild thing that will never be able to be controlled.

She’s a wolf. He’s a wolf.

“Raylan,” his mother finally says in a timid voice, “go back to bed. I’ll…I’ll be up there in a sec, alright, darlin’?”

He doesn’t even recall walking back up to his bedroom. He just finds himself standing there in the dark, blood on his pajamas and his knuckles torn up and his head pounding and body aching. Aella pushes him carefully towards his bed and he falls into it. In the morning, he’ll wake up to blood on his sheets and freak out a little, but for now, he doesn’t care.

 _Aella,_ he pleads in his mind.

And she comes without hesitation. She’s larger than she’s ever been, as if the anger flooded her so much that she had to grow to make space for it, but she jumps into the bed with him and presses her body against him. Her fur is softer than it looks and he buries his wet face into it, clutching onto her so tightly that it must hurt her. She licks his face some more.

“I’m settled,” she tells him in the dark. Most daemons and kids are unsure at first. They feel settled, but there’s that feeling of self-doubt as well. After years and years of being able to change at whim, it’s a bit difficult to understand the feeling of being settled. Aella does not need that though. There’s a bit of sadness in her voice and he can see the fear in her eyes where fury had burned just minutes ago.

“I know.”

“Are you…?”

Raylan presses his forehead against hers. “If you’re a wolf, I’m a wolf.”

 

 

 


	2. part two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They’re already wolves though. No need to add one more thing that makes them fucked up and weird.

  
**someday my pain will mark you (harness your blame)**   
_part two_   


 

When he shoots his first man while on the job, Raylan doesn’t even blink and neither does Aella. Pulling his gun out and shooting was more like second nature than anything, like taking another breath, and it just so happened to come about. Raylan instinctively knew the guy was going to pull on him, so that by the time he finally did, Raylan’s gun was already out and the bullet was already shot.

What actually startles Raylan is when the man’s daemon, a falcon of some sort, just bursts into gold dust.

He’s seen men die before, on TV and when he served briefly in the Marines, but it was from a distance or surreal. The shit on TV was just special effects and in the Marines it was never up close. He didn’t care much. But when he shot and killed his first man as a Marshall, the other guy’s daemon practically exploded dust all over him. It fades away into nothing and he looks down at Aella, looking more confused than anything.

“Dust?” is all he can think of to say.

“Dust,” Aella confirms.

He holsters his gun, pops a kink out of his neck, and swipes away at any invisible dust that might still be on his suit jacket. As Aella prowls around the body, sniffing at it and looking decidedly not bothered, Raylan calls the Chief Deputy of the Dallas office he’s currently positioned at. A few other bystanders have already called 911, thinking that they’ve witnessed some terrible homicide, their daemons hiding behind them. Aella looks out at them with pure disdain and he gives her a nudge and a look to make her stop. If wolves could shrug their shoulders, she would have done so carelessly.

“This is gonna involve a lot of paperwork,” Raylan sighs as he sits down on the curb.

“Should’ve thought of that before you shot the man,” Aella snips.

“Hey, he pulled first,” Raylan points out.

Aella sits down in front of him on her haunches. “Not really. You didn’t give him much of a chance – you just sorta…shot him while he was still pullin’.”

“He was gonna shoot me,” Raylan says, almost to himself. You’re told that shooting someone in the line of duty will bother you – it’ll shake you to your core – it’ll mess your shit right up. But he doesn’t feel it, at least not like he thinks he should. He looks at Aella. She looks at him. (She doesn’t feel it either – doesn’t feel the guilt or regret seeping into her bones like he thinks they should.) “All I did was shoot him first.”

“Han fuckin’ Solo,” Aella snorts, but it’s with terrible fondness.

\- - - - -

It’s Aella that points out to Raylan that he’s stupidly in love with Winona. It’s also Aella that tells him that he’s likely to fuck it up, but she says it with gentleness that he can’t be mad at her, not one bit. (She’s right, of course. She’s always right.) If it isn’t for her, he probably wouldn’t have figured it out for himself for a few more months and then it would have taken him some more months to actually say it and she might have been long gone with a man that could actually speak how he felt properly.

As it is, she’s with him; and he’s not exactly the talk-about-my-mushy-feelings type.

To be honest, it’s no surprise that it’s taken him this long since he still doesn’t even know what he and Winona are. They’ve gone on more than a few dates and spent half their nights in the same bed. He’s dated girls before and had a few relationships, but none of them quite compare to what he’s got with Winona, whatever it is. He loves her and that scares the shit out of him. He can only ever remember loving two people and that’s his mother and his Aunt Helen. This is a different love though. This is a love that makes him want to call up his momma and panic on the phone to her.

And then there’s Aella, who he’s never seen so…calm.

She’s sweet again, his Aella, and so terribly happy. He hasn’t seen her look like this since he was real little; back when Arlo wasn’t so cruel or at least when his mother was able to better hide the fighting. She’s damn near four times the size of Winona’s daemon, Charon, but she’ll let him lie on her belly or lick her on the snout. Raylan can’t even begin to describe or understand the stupid warm feelings he gets in his chest whenever he gets up to take a piss in the middle of the night and spots the little ocelot curled up against Aella by the bedroom door.

“You should tell her,” Aella says again and again, but he can never get the words out. Can’t find the right time, he always says, but that’s just an excuse and they both know it. He’s never told any girl that he’s loved them because he didn’t and he didn’t think it was ever worth lying about.

He’s lying in bed about an hour before he’s due to get up for work, wide awake and staring at Winona’s bedroom ceiling. Just when he’s about to get up, maybe get something to eat, Winona rolls over to face him and opens her eyes, looking all muzzy and out of it. “Hey there,” she mumbles.

“‘Mornin’,” he whispers back, leaning over to kiss her. She’s so tired that she doesn’t even push him away with a laugh to complain about his morning breath.

 _Tell her,_ Aella thinks at him hard from across the room.

“What’re you doin’ up so early?”

“Just thinkin’.”

_Tell her or I’ll tell her!_

_Like hell you will,_ Raylan shoots back.

“Thinkin’? Well that don’t sound good. Could be dangerous.” Winona closes her eyes though, a smile on her face.

“Nothin’ too bad. I love you. Go back to sleep.”

For a minute, Raylan doesn’t think anything of it. He closes his eyes, feigns sleep like he always does after first waking up, and thinks that he got away scot-free. _There, I said it._ And he feels victorious. Nothing big is made about it. No gasps, no shock, no awkward silence. Aella will admonish him once they’re in the car, telling him it doesn’t count, but he said it and that’s all that matters. It’s Winona’s fault about not hearing it for falling back asleep.

“You love me?” Her voice sounds so tiny and fragile that it makes Raylan open his eyes again to look at her. She looks a little scared, which is not something that you want to see on a girl whenever you tell her that you love her.

Raylan can’t think of anything to say that will comfort her. No? I was just joking? Yes? I love you – so much that I feel like I might accidentally shoot my gun if I hold it and think of you? Maybe? I’ve never been in love so I really don’t know what it’s supposed to feel like. None of those options sound like a good idea at all.

 _You’re such shit at this,_ Aella grumbles as she leaps onto the bed. Winona sits up in surprise. She’s eye-to-eye with Aella, who is trying her best to not look intimidating at all. But Aella’s a wolf. She’s nothing but intimidating. Raylan has always liked how Winona never seems terribly scared of Aella or how it’s like she ignores the fact that he’s got a wolf for a daemon and that’s fucking weird. Except right now she does look scared and Raylan’s half in mind to tell Aella to get off the bed. _Such shit._

“Aella–”

But of course she does something completely off course. Aella steps forward and rubs the top of her head against Winona’s neck, pressing her body into Winona’s; and it nearly knocks Raylan off the bed. He’s literally blown back against the mattress, gasping for air, as his soul pushes against Winona.

“ _Oh_ ,” Winona gasps. “You love me.”

Raylan can’t even choke something out. He’s too messed up in the head over the way it feels to have someone else touch his daemon. The last time Aella had touched anyone but him, she’d been biting down on Arlo’s arm the night she settled as a wolf. This is something completely, wonderfully different. He’s never felt this before – never felt so close to a person in his fucking life. Every other emotional tie he’s had seems like nothing now that Winona’s fingers are digging into Aella’s fur and she’s practically in tears and Aella is practically humming, his soul is fucking humming…

“Of course he loves you,” Aella responds. “We both love you.”

It takes more strength than he can ever remember mustering, but he forces himself up and looks over at the bedroom to Winona’s daemon, who is still sitting on the floor. Charon looks unsure, almost terrified, like he doesn’t know what’s going on. He’s almost certain that he allowed Winona’s last boyfriend to touch him, and maybe that’s why he’s so hesitant. He doesn’t want Winona to get hurt again; _he_ doesn’t want to get hurt again.

“Charon?” he asks, holding out an unsteady hand. (His hand has never been unsteady. He’s never had a shaky hand in his life. He’s shot men, killed men, held a gun in his hands for half his life, and it’s never been shaky like this.)

Winona pulls her face away from Aella’s and nods her head. In the next instant, Charon is on top of the bed and pushing his head into Raylan’s hand.

“Shit,” Raylan hisses, because Winona’s soul is in his hands. She trusts him with this, with her soul, with all that she is. Charon, who has always been distant with him no matter how close he’s become with Aella, is trusting him. Winona lets out another ragged gasp, the same sound she makes whenever she’s orgasming, and she clutches even tighter to Aella. With Charon leaning up against him, Raylan reaches out and grasps Winona’s hand even as she holds tight to Aella’s black fur. Aella licks Charon’s back.

It feels like an electric bolt shoots through all of them.

After a while, everything begins to ease and they’re able to lie down, one tangled mess. Aella puts most of her weight on top of him, something he’s used to, but she lays her head on Winona’s stomach. Charon is curled on top of Winona’s chest, but his tail brushes against Raylan’s arm. He never lets go of her hand; she’s got her head on his shoulder; and their legs are in a somewhat painful jumble. None of them care.

“Should’ve done this ages ago,” Aella mutters.

“Maybe if ya’ll weren’t as emotionally closed off as a liquor store on Sundays,” Charon says back.

Winona kisses his shoulder. “I love you too, by the way.”

 _Told you I’d tell her,_ Aella thinks smugly as they all drift off to sleep.

He ends up calling in for work two hours after the fact.

\- - - - -

“You think she’s settled?”

“’Course she’s settled. Think I’m too stupid to know when my own daemon is settled?”

 _Maybe,_ Aella says.

_Shut up._

“That’s wild, Raylan,” Boyd says as he crouches down to Aella’s level. He’s about half a foot away from her newly settled face, closer than she really lets anyone else besides Raylan get to her. The few people that have seen her and realized that she hasn’t changed shapes – that recognize a settled daemon when they see one – won’t get anywhere near her, but it’s like Boyd doesn’t even notice the sharp teeth or cold eyes. “Wow, a wolf!”

Raylan swells up with a bit of boyish pride, the kind of pride that comes with finally being settled. It’s like when your voice is finally done changing from a boy’s voice to a man’s or you get that first major growth spurt that every boy is jealous of – except he’s yet to go through either of those. All weekend, whenever he went into town, people seemed wary of him, afraid even; and while he didn’t want to say it, it kind of stung a bit. When he showed up at school, parents literally pulled their kids away from him and teachers whispered to one another.

Boyd though – he seemed genuinely impressed and cool with it. “I wonder what Atha will settle as,” he muses as he stands back up straight. His daemon shifts into a wolf, a light grey one, though not the size of Aella. Almost instantly the two of them begin to tumble with one another, rolling around on the trouble and pushing each other. “I like the way she can change though. Sometimes I wish she won’t ever settle.”

There’s always that weird feeling when you get around the age of settling. Half of you wants desperately for your daemon to settle, so you can be a grown up, so you can be a man, but the other half of you never wants to grow up and you want to be able to change forever.

(Because you never truly stop changing, so why does your soul have to?)

The bell rings, letting them know that school is about to start up again. Boyd’s Athaliah shifts into bird and flies onto his shoulder and then into a little Gardner snake so she can slip down into his arm sleeve. Aella just looks up at Raylan patiently. It’s taking time for both of them to accept that she can’t just change at a whim, but no matter what people whisper about her behind their backs, he loves her the way she is now.

“School sucks,” Boyd grumbles as they head back to the building.

“S’better than bein’ at home,” Raylan says, more to himself. He doesn’t talk about his home life with anyone, but he knows that Boyd is okay. Their dads work together – or, well, they make money together somehow or another. Boyd already knows what Arlo Givens is like so there’s no sense in trying to hide it.

“Maybe so,” Boyd huffs, “but I think it’s a damn waste of time. Like I got nothin’ better to do than just have some old bag of wind tellin’ me shit I don’t care about.” He shakes his head. Atha peeks her head out of his shirt and looks up at him. “The real stuff – the important stuff – we can’t learn in no school buildin’. We gotta learn it out there on our own, you know?”

Raylan knows – he knows exactly what the other boy is talking about – but he doesn’t necessarily agree. Try as his mother might and despite his father never really talking to him, Raylan pretty much knows what his father gets up to in the middle of the night. And everyone in Harlan County knows what Bo Crowder does in these parts.

“I guess,” Raylan replies.

Boyd doesn’t even seem to hear Raylan’s hesitance. “I mean, what’re we really gonna do with the shit they tell us in here? I don’t need to know about shit that happened hundreds of years ago. I can already read, write, count, and talk. But are they gonna teach us how to deal with the real shit? How to deal with people?”

He doesn’t say it, doesn’t have to say it. What Boyd’s really saying is that school isn’t going to teach him how to be a proper criminal like his papa.

 _I don’t wanna be like Arlo,_ Raylan can’t help but think when the teacher starts talking and Boyd is doodling is Raylan can’t concentrate on what the woman is saying.

 _You won’t be,_ Aella promises him, her head resting on his lap under the cramped desk. _You won’t be anything like him, you’ll see._

\- - - - -

“Raylan, you can’t just go around shooting people!”

“That’s not what I’m doin’.”

“Yes, goddamnit, yes you are.”

At his side, looking more dog than wolf since they’re being reprimanded, Aella rolls her eyes.

“That’s not helping,” Deputy Chief Grant’s bobcat daemon, Fallon, snaps.

Raylan can feel the waves of anger radiating off of Aella. He wants to touch her head, remind her that she needs to calm down, but he can’t do that, not without letting his boss and daemon know that Aella is about a second away from losing control. She could chew Fallon up and swallow her down whole in a matter of a few bites, but she does nothing of the sort, just sits there, eyes cast downward. It’s hard letting someone lower on the food chain tell you what to do – especially when that someone is higher up than you on the job ladder.

“He pulled on me. I pulled on him. He shot badly. I didn’t. That’s it.” Raylan rolls his shoulders back, stands up straight. He wants nothing more than to get a glass of bourbon right now, hole up in some dank bar in the sunniest place on earth, but he’s got to wait until his boss is finished chewing him out. Still, if Grant is expecting an apology of some sorts, he’s looking at the wrong U.S. Marshal. “Everybody makes mistakes. His just happened to be a fatal one.”

“Letting you transfer here out of Glynco might have been mine,” Grant sighs as he sits back down behind his desk. Fallon doesn’t leave the top of the desk. Her eyes are still boring deep holes into Aella’s skull. “You’re a good Marshal, Raylan – I’ll give you that – but this is the… What? How many people have you hunted down, shot, and killed?”

“In the Miami office alone or are we also counting Salt Lake and Dallas?” Fallon asks, finally turning her attention back to her human.

Grant rubs the bridge of his nose. “Hell, I don’t know.”

“It’s not like I ask to hunt down the fugitives that are more likely to try and kill me,” Raylan points out, putting his hands on his hips underneath his suit jacket. “I don’t go through the files and think, ‘Hm, I wonder which one is gonna try to put a bullet in me so I can shoot first.’ We deal with bad men. This is just a possible outcome, a chance we have to take when we take this job.”

“A casualty of war?” Grant offers dryly.

“If you want to look at it that way.”

“Well, with you, it isn’t just a ‘possible outcome;’ it’s a likely inevitability.”

Raylan makes a face, one that suggests that his boss isn’t entirely wrong.

“Just…go do your job.”

When they return to his desk, Raylan sits down and starts the paperwork that he’s become used to doing over the past few years. Three years into his time in Miami and he’s shot… Well, how many men had he shot in self-defense?

 _Is it really self-defense when you don’t give them much of a chance?_ Aella asks with a quirk of her ears.

He gives them a chance – he really does. They shouldn’t draw on him; no one should draw on him. He’s also been quicker than most people and he’s always just– Well, he’s just always known who is going to pull on him and who isn’t. He’s good at quick snap judgments, same as Aella. She’ll twitch her tail a certain way, letting him know that she sees a gun that he can’t, or she’ll bare her teeth when she knows a man is too much of a pisser to do anything to fight back. Every man that he’s ever shot has always had their hands on a gun, has always been halfway through drawing their weapon.

It’s just that he and Aella can both sense when a man is going to try to kill them before the man seems to know it himself.

\- - - - -

It’s not the first time he gets a little cocky and finds himself getting tooled up by some two bit thugs. Raylan’s smart, in his own way, but he’s got a lone wolf approach that puts even fellow Marshal’s on edge. It’s because of this that Raylan finds himself tied up to a chair in some sweltering Miami warehouse getting the shit beat out of him.

He spits some blood out of his mouth and shakes his head, trying to get the blood out of his eyes. “Didn’t you used to be a boxer or somethin’? What kind of punch was that? You think that’s why you flushed out?”

That earns him another punch, this one to the gut, and he doubles over in pain, the wind knocked right out of him.

When Raylan looks up, he can’t help but glance over at Aella. They’ve got her tied down, the two other men’s daemons circling around her. One looks like some sort of cougar, the other a ratty-looking coyote. Aella is bigger than both of them, more wild than all of them in the room put together, but they’ve got her back paws tied down and she’s bleeding from her side and there’s a muzzle on her.

A fucking muzzle. Raylan can feel his blood singing at that. He wants to kill both of these fuckers for even daring to put a muzzle of his Aella.

The two men look at each other, look at their daemons, and then back to Raylan.

 _No,_ is the only thing he can think.

Getting the ass handed to him while tied to a chair, waiting for back up to miraculously show up, is one thing, but getting tortured like that… He can see the idea forming in their eyes. It’s an unspoken rule that you don’t fuck with a person’s daemon. You can beat the ever-living shit out of the person, but you don’t touch their daemon, don’t fuck with it. That’s the goddamn rule of life.

First, the big man gets a rope and loops it around Aella’s neck. She struggles viciously, growling underneath the muzzle, and shakes her head, but he gets it around there.

“Don’t fucking touch her!” Raylan screams. It’s a sign of weakness and he hates himself for it, can hear Aella yelling at him to shut up – _shut the fuck up, Raylan, don’t let them see you bleed_ – but he can’t stop himself. How fucking dare they?

The man doesn’t listen though. He tightens the rope around Aella’s neck and Raylan can feel her, can feel himself, choking, and then the man jerks hard. Raylan jerks hard against his own ropes as Aella fights back. She begins to fight so much that the two other daemons have to pounce on her to control her. The coyote bites her neck and the cougar smacks her with its paws and she–

She can’t howl. She can’t snap or bite back. Instead she’s howling in his head and he’s howling out loud, struggling in the chair so hard that he actually falls forward and lands on his face on the cold concrete.

The second man has to jump in and starts pulling on the rope as well and they’re dragging her across the floor, out of the room. She’s four, five, six, seven feet away from him when he starts to feel the tug. All law enforcement officers are required to test the boundaries of distance with their daemons. Twenty feet is the regulation distance, but it hurt still and it hurts even more when you’re out of each other’s sight.

Raylan is still howling when they pull Aella out of the room and the doors shut, leaving him alone in the room. He can’t see her and he can only hear the muffled struggles of the two men and their daemons and his heavy breathing and panicking heart and sudden screams. He’s not even saying words anymore, just wild howling and awkward movements on the ground with the chair stuck on top of him. His head pounds, but it’s his chest – it’s his soul – he feels like he’s been torn in half from the inside out. He knows somehow that they’re past twenty feet, they’re– god, thirty feet, thirty-five feet. He feels like he’s being ripped in the middle, an inch at a time, like the seam holding his entire existence together is being systematically torn from him.

 _Aella,_ he thinks, the words reaching out blindly into the empty room. _Aella, Aella, Aella._

Using his last bit of strength, Raylan slams his shoulder into the ground and shouts in pain. He does it twice more before his arm is out of socket and he’s able to somehow pull himself out of his binds. It’s slow and painful, but he unties his legs from the chair and raggedly forces himself to his feet. He stumbles towards the doors, gasping for breath, nearly tumbling the whole time, and then rams his shoulder again into the wall in one clean movement, knocking it back into place. (Thank God for those fights as a kid.)

He damn near falls through the door, runs into the wall, and then makes a right. He can’t hear anything anymore except the blood pumping in his ears and he can barely breathe, but he knows where to go. (Home is not where the heart is. Home is where Aella is. Home is Aella. It always has been.) He wanders further down the hall, what feels like miles but is only fifty feet, and he can hear them again through the door at the end. The only reason they don’t hear him coming is because they’re too busy shouting at each other and fighting with a weakened but still furious Aella, who has broken the ties on her back paws.

One guy has his gun tucked into the belt of his pants. Raylan just grabs the gun without thinking and shoots the man holding onto the rope choking Aella in the back of the head. His cougar daemon explodes into dust. The other guy turns, his gun partially out, but Raylan says, “No,” in a strangely calm voice and shoots the man right between the eyes. His coyote daemon yelps and vanishes into thin air.

Raylan drops the gun, drops to his knees, and holds out his hands. Aella limps over to him and he takes the muzzle off of her, throwing it to the other side of the room. “Oh,” he mumbles as he presses his face into her neck, grips her bloodied fur tightly, pulls her close to him. “ _Oh._ ”

She’s with him. She’s back with him and he feels whole again. He feels the tears inside of him slowly mending and the ache in his chest dulling. As she nuzzles against him, pressing as close to him as she can physically get, he can feel himself being sewn back together again.

“I’m sorry, Raylan,” she cries – she _cries_. His Aella hasn’t fucking cried since they were seven and they saw Limehouse damn near kill Arlo for damn near killing Francis. But she’s whimpering and her whole body is shaking, like some sort of pup that’s been kicked, and his chest burns, his mouth dries up, and he grips her even tighter. “I tried fighting them, but I couldn’t and I–”

“It ain’t nothin’,” he tells her. “It ain’t nothin’.”

Raylan will never let anyone separate him from Aella again and they never talk about it again, never talk about how they felt like they died. How he looked like a zombie, but maybe he’d been one for a second. He’s covered in blood and bruises and scratches and their blood mingles together in her fur, but neither of them care.

It should have killed them, being separated that much from each other. Raylan tells Grant that they took Aella about twenty-five feet from him before he got loose and found her again. It was sixty feet though. Sixty fucking feet of separation.

They’re already wolves though. No need to add one more thing that makes them fucked up and weird.

 


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Raylan blinks. He can hear Aella howling in his mind and Boyd shouting out loud, can feel the rocks shifting in front of him, can smell the sulfur and coal, can practically touch the fear and panic of the men running in the mines behind him. Atha looks up at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her eyes bright, her red fur sticking up as wild as Boyd’s hair always is. He doesn’t think.
> 
> (You never think, goddamnit, Raylan, you never think)

“That is the dumbest-looking thing I have ever seen on you – and I’ve seen a lotta dumbass things on you,” Aella states, sitting down on her haunches and shaking her head.

Raylan looks back at her and shoots her a grin. “I think it makes me look kinda cool.”

“What you think you are? Some kind of cowboy?”

“Well I am a U.S. Deputy Marshal now.”

Aella barks out a laugh. “Marshals ain’t cowboys anymore.”

Raylan turns back to his reflection, fingers the rim of the hat. When he was a kid, he would run around the house wearing the cowboy hat of an old Halloween costume his mother had bought him. He’d chase Aella through each room, outside on their property, through trees and holler and back. She’d turn into a raccoon and pretend to be a bandit and a few times into a pony so they could ride around pretending to be real cowboys.

This hat… It makes him feel a little more complete, like he does in the middle of the night when Aella presses up against him and licks his face when she’s sleepy.

“I’m gonna get it,” Raylan decides.

“You’re mad,” Aella says.

“I like it; I’m gonna get it; and I’m gonna wear it all the damn time.”

“Now you’re just saying that to piss me off,” Aella sighs as they walk up to the counter.

Raylan doesn’t really pay the man behind the counter any mind or his squirrel daemon. He pays for the hat, giving Aella cheeky looks the whole time, and then puts it right back on his head before they walk outside. The sun hits them hard, painting them in heat, but at least his eyes are shielded thanks to the hat. Aella has to duck her head as they make their way to the car.

“Maybe I oughtta buy you a hat,” Raylan muses aloud as he turns the key in the ignition.

“You do that,” Aella grounds out, “and I’ll eat the damn thing.”

Turning the wheel around, Raylan backs the car out of the lot and then pulls back out onto the road. “There’s a dog somewhere in you yet.”

\- - - - -

“Goddamn, it’s hotter’n hell down here!” Boyd shouts over the sound of the machines, men, and fire.

“I imagine this is hell!” Raylan replies.

Close at his heels, Aella hangs her head and growls under her breath. She hates it down here and he hates dragging her down here even more, but he can’t come down here without her. They tried that once, stupidly, him thinking he could handle it and her all sorts of wary. After twenty-five feet apart from each other, he felt like he was getting his guts torn out of him and he couldn’t breathe. Boyd had to haul his ass halfway back to her and Aella ran full speed, resisting every urge to howl.

Boyd’s daemon Athaliah isn’t nearly as ruffled as Aella is about being down in the mines. Sure, she doesn’t like it, but Raylan can tell that Atha doesn’t like being parted from Boyd one bit. She doesn’t go more than five feet from him when they’re down here and that’s only because she has to get out of the way of the machinery.

It happens without warning, as all fatal work accidents seem to do down in this black circle of hell.

Raylan’s in the middle of wiping sweat from his brow, turning his head to look back at Aella to reassure her that it’s almost lunch, when there’s a loud explosion. Everything shakes and trembles, forcing Raylan to grab hold of the wall to keep himself on his feet; and there’s a roar that sounds more like beast than machine or mountain.

“What in the hell…?”

He turns to look at Boyd and catches the strange look in his eyes. There’s no time to say anything else. There’s another earth-shaking boom and men are shouting and running. Raylan doesn’t have a clue what’s going on, but the panic is enough to entice him to run as well, back to the surface where he belongs. He drops the tool in his hands and turns around, taking off like a bat out of hell, Aella quick on his heels. Boyd is a few feet ahead of him, Atha lithely following him.

Their reasons for running soon become apparent though as smoke begins to fill his lungs and pebbles fall on his head. He can even feel the fire from the explosion licking at his back. There are people behind him, men trapped and their screams echoing off the cavern walls, but he ignores them. He has to.

_The mine’s collapsing._

The voice in his head doesn’t belong to him. The thought does not come from him. It’s Aella’s, quicker in body and mind than him as she always is, making the connections for him faster so he can live just a little bit longer.

“Hurry the hell up, Givens!” Boyd shouts at him.

“I’m–” Hacking and coughing takes over his voice. The smoke is unbearable and he can barely see. He’s holding his hands out as he runs to make sure he doesn’t run straight into a wall and it bumps over the shoulders and backs of other men doing their best to escape the collapsing mine. Loud cracks follow him, at his back and on his sides, and he feels like he’s running in a fixed race where the only outcome is losing.

He’s not going to make it. He’s going to get trapped in this hell hole.

For some reason, the notion of getting stuck down here in a collapsed shaft doesn’t scare the shit out of him. It’s the idea of Aella being stuck down here that gets his ass into gear. As long as she gets out, everything will be fine. Even if they’ve got ten feet of rock separating them, he’ll be fine, so long as she has the sun shining on her.

_Stop being such a sentimental jackass and run!_

He stumbles for a moment, tripping over a rock or maybe a person, but before he can fall, Aella bumps into him and uses her body to keep him standing. She’s big, sturdy, and just enough to keep him from falling flat on his face and getting trampled. Enough to keep him running.

That’s about the time a huge slab of rock falls in front of him, dust and dirt blowing in his face. He throws his arms up in front of his face and skids to a halt. When he opens his eyes, all he sees is darkness, not a complete cave in, but just enough to startle him into stopping. A deep cut in his chest tells him that Aella is out of his sight, and that’s enough to finally send him down into panic along with everyone else.

“Oh, oh!”

A whine from behind catches his attention. It takes him only a second to see Athaliah behind him, whimpering and nudging at a rock that has fallen on her leg and pinned her down.

Raylan blinks. He can hear Aella howling in his mind and Boyd shouting out loud, can feel the rocks shifting in front of him, can smell the sulfur and coal, can practically touch the fear and panic of the men running in the mines behind him. Atha looks up at him, her chest rising and falling rapidly, her eyes bright, her red fur sticking up as wild as Boyd’s hair always is. He doesn’t think.

( _You never think, goddamnit, Raylan, you never think_ )

Pushing the rock off her, Raylan bends down and picks up Athaliah. A jolt runs through him, something like an electric shock, but not…unpleasant, followed by a chill that runs all the way up his spine. Apparently Atha felt it as well because she yelped immediately – or maybe it was Boyd that made the noise or maybe it was just because her leg looked like it might’ve been broken. Whatever it is, a dizziness overcomes him, making him feel drunk on…fear and anger and shock. There’s so much surging through him that isn’t his own and it makes it difficult to remember his own emotions.

 _I’ve got you,_ he thinks as he shoves his way through to the other side, waves of…something rolling over him the longer he holds onto Boyd’s soul.

And though she isn’t his, though she’s Boyd’s ( _she_ is _Boyd_ ), the look in her eyes tells him that she knows.

Light breaks through, slipping in between the rocks and coal dust. With one hand clutching Atha protectively against his chest and the other tipping his hardhat down to shield his eyes, Raylan pushes through and gulps down a breath of fresh air – or as close as fresh as he can get, soot and dirt clinging to the back of his throat.

“ _Athaliah_ –” A pained, gasping sort of moan distracts Raylan and he sees Boyd stumbling towards them, pushing his way against the men fighting to return to the outside world. Immediately Raylan holds the little fox out to him, knowing full well that she’s broken a leg and can’t run to her human, and Boyd takes hold of his daemon.

Raylan has never thought that Boyd was the sort of person that was capable of crying about anything – but it’s hard as hell to hide tears when your face is covered in black shit. Boyd clings to Atha, so much so that it looks like he’s trying to push his soul back into his chest so she can never be parted from him again. He strokes her fur, whispering into her twitching ears, cradling her, protecting her.

It isn’t until Raylan feels a bump behind his knee that he buckles, collapsing awkwardly on top of Aella and the ground. He reaches out for her and she comes to him, rubbing her face against the side of his cheek, as if wiping the dirt off him. When he touches her, her entire body is vibrating and he notices how her hair is standing up on her back. He pulls her to him, hugs her, but doesn’t say a word. He doesn’t have to. She knows. Aella always knows.

Close or distant, not being able to see your daemon always stings. They played when they were kids, testing their boundaries, seeing how far they could go from each other, but Aella would come flying back to him the moment he couldn’t see her. _“I was scared I wouldn’t exist if you couldn’t see me,”_ she confessed. That was when they were real little, back when everyone seemed to wonder if a tree still made a sound if no one was there to hear it.

 _Dumbass_ , she thinks, but it’s warm and gentle, something she rarely allows herself to be anymore.

But it’s for him. He needs it, needs the coddling and the softness, because though he won’t say it out loud, down in that mine, he had been afraid that he couldn’t possibly exist without being able to see her.

\- - - - -

“Aella, that was the last moon pie!”

As if she’s just trying to pour salt in the mood, Aella has the gall to shift from a golden lab form to a sheep for just a second, the cream of the moon pie still on her lips and tongue.

Raylan leaps forward from his spot on the floor, trying to grasp onto her, but Aella shifts into a collie and bounds away from him, barking out laughs. He’s just five, but he’s quick, jumping up and chasing after her out the screen door of his house.

And he crashes right into his father.

He falls back on his ass, the wood stinging him, and nearly bangs his head on the wall. As he slowly recovers, he takes note of his father looming over him, his eyes looking foggy and distant from drinking, and then he sees Aella still in a collie form pinned underneath his father’s Mara. Rubbing at his eyes, like he’s subconsciously trying to remind his father that he’s just a boy, he’s just five, only a kid, Raylan pulls himself to his feet.

“What did I tell you about runnin’ ‘round inside the house?”

Raylan casts his eyes to the ground. “Not to do it,” he mumbles to his father’s boots.

“And what did I tell you would happen if you did it again?”

“That you’d put a boot up my ass.”

He can’t help himself. He instinctively flinches when Mara bites down on Aella.

“Now come here–” His father goes to grab him by the shoulder.

Some days, Raylan will take it. He’ll crumple up and go away in his head, pretend he’s somewhere else, and then he’ll curl up in bed and sniffle as the bruises settle on his body. But then Aella yelps in pain and there’s a stab of pain in his chest and his mind isn’t far away. It’s like his mind is connected to Aella’s and he feels more animal than human, more wild and flighty.

“No!” Raylan shouts. He kicks Arlo in the shins, making the older man howl and curse, and jumps off the porch. The sudden shout distracts Mara just enough to allow Aella to shift into a bunny rabbit and slip out of the pitbull’s grasp. The two of them take off across the lawn, his father yelling and Mara barking behind them, but there’s nothing in the world that can stop Raylan now. Once he sets his mind to running, he’s running, and he’s gone, down the hill, through a corn field, running even when every breath he takes feels like he’s sucking down fire and his legs throb to the point of becoming numb.

He runs all the way to his Aunt Helen’s place. It’s not too far, but far enough to where he knows Arlo won’t be able to chase them. Mara is fast, but Arlo’s been drinking and can’t bear to be separated from Mara farther than five feet.

(What’s it say about a man who can’t be parted from their soul when it seems on some days like he doesn’t have one?)

Raylan bursts into his Aunt Helen’s home. She’s not there, but the back door is always unlocked for him. He runs through the hallway and into the living room. Tearing the closet open, he shoves his way past clothes and every little random knick knack until he finds the little tiny hiding place he found two years ago. Hiding in the dark hidden place in the closet is one of Raylan’s first memories. There are some nights when he’s huddling in there that he thinks that maybe he was born here.

And so he hides in the closet, knees to his chest and arms wrapped around his legs. He uses every bit of his energy to control his breathing, so he’s not loud. Aella is curled up in his shirt, resting near his heart, in a field mouse form. She’s so tiny and soft, but he can feel her heart racing against his.

 _You shouldn’t have done that,_ Aella squeaks out, nuzzling against him.

Raylan closes his eyes and bites his lip. _Mara was hurting you. I didn’t want her to hurt you._

 _It’s my job to protect you,_ Aella says, sadness tainting every word, like she knows that she’ll only ever fail him. He knows she won’t though. Raylan doesn’t know a lot of things, but he knows Aella and he knows that even though she is always right, sometimes she can be wrong too.

In his life, Raylan will do a lot of dumbass things, and a lot of them will be because of his insane need to protect Aella and she’ll snap at him every time, but he can’t help himself. Everyone’s weakness is their daemon and everyone is connected to their daemon, but Raylan knows it’s more than that with him and Aella. Raylan knows that she’s more than just a part of him.

He’s a part of her.

( _If you’re a wolf, I’m a wolf._ )

\- - - - -

Just as Aella is an extension of him, so is the baseball bat. Ever since he picked up one in the house and hit Arlo in the side with it to escape another beating, Raylan has felt a kinship with the sport. He mowed enough people’s lawns so that he could buy his own bat when he was eleven. It wasn’t that great, but it was his.

Even now, as he stands on deck, Raylan lazily swings the bat, keeping one eye on Dickie Bennett pitching and another eye on Aella as she prowls around in the dugout. Most people have to keep their daemons close to them when they play, which makes playing any sport somewhat more of a challenge, but they’ve practiced well enough where Aella can usually stay out of the way. Neither of them particularly likes it, but he hates the idea of her accidentally getting hurt somehow. It happens all the time, and it’s not pleasant at all.

 _Stop worrying about me and focus on Dickie,_ Aella chides him.

Raylan smiles slightly, ducking his head so that the rim of his helmet shields his face. If Raylan hates Dickie, then Aella most certainly loathes Dickie’s raccoon daemon Mahlah. She’s small compared to most raccoons, clinging onto Dickie even while he pitches. She never once falls off him, no matter how erratic his throwing becomes when he’s frustrated. It must take everything in Aella’s power to not swallow that little daemon up whenever he and Dickie get into it.

When it’s finally his turn, Raylan steps up to the plate and gets ready. He zeros in on Dickie and just smiles back at him, knowing full well that it’ll just piss the Bennett boy off even more. “I’d say give me your best shot, but I don’t think that’s worth much against me,” he calls.

Dickie seethes and Mahlah digs her claws into his shoulder. Aella paces outside of the dugout now, full of energy and the desire to take a crack at the other daemon. Her irritation puffs her up, makes her look even bigger than she already is. Even his own teammates and their daemons keep a good distance from her. Raylan keeps his cool though, forces himself to relax even though he knows that he has to hit the ball. He can’t mess up now.

The first two pitches are balls, both of them wildly out of his reach. The third one ends up being a foul tip. He hits the fourth one, but it goes way out of bounds, landing in the parking lot.

“Come on, Dickie,” Raylan says, “just walk me. It’s the safest bet and what your coach wants.”

The fifth pitch hits him square in the head and he’s down on the ground before he can even feel stunned.

Two things happen: one) Aella immediately bounds toward him; and two) Dickie somehow beats her and places one well-placed kick to Raylan’s ribs. Before he can get a cleat to the face though, Raylan grasps his dropped baseball bat and swings as hard as he can. Not only does he feel the vibrations through the bat when it connects with Dickie’s knee, but he hears the crack of bone too, somehow louder than Dickie’s shout of pain. Now Dickie’s on the ground too and Mahlah has for the first time fallen off his shoulder. Before Raylan can get up though, Aella is on Mahlah, snarling and tearing into the little creature.

He knows this at once: Aella is going to kill Mahlah.

She is going to fucking kill Mahlah and Raylan just blinks, dust settling around him, his head pounding so hard that he can’t even begin to focus on a train of thought. He doesn’t think. He just watches, partly in shock, partly in horror, and partly in…nothing. He doesn’t feel a thing himself, but he can feel Aella’s desire for blood, her want to taste it, drink it.

“Raylan, stop her!” someone is shouting. Now that his brain is coming to, he can hear other people shouting, not just Dickie’s hollering. “Stop her!”

If Mahlah dies, then so does Dickie.

“Goddamnit, Raylan! Aella!”

Raylan rolls onto his belly and see his Aunt Helen shove through the gate and run towards them, her honey badger daemon Ezekial just a few feet in front of her. Ezekial is a fourth of the size of Aella. When he was little, before Aella settled, he always seemed so much bigger than her. If she ever got out of line, one smack from Ezekial would calm her down. Nothing and no one is going to stop Aella now. She’s too big, too strong, too much for Harlan. It’ll take at least five daemons to subdue his Aella, but by then it’ll be too late.

And if Aella kills Mahlah, then she’ll have killed Dickie too. He will have killed Dickie.

His chest aches and his head feels like it might split whenever he moves, but Raylan pushes himself to his feet and staggers towards Aella. He barely has the will to speak, and so he just tackles her and collapses in an awkward heap on top of her, knocking her away from Mahlah.

“Let go of me, Raylan!” Aella shouts.

“You’re going to kill her!” he yells back, using all his strength to hold onto her, wrapping his arms around her body and using his own weight to pin her to the ground. He’s always known that she was strong, but feeling it firsthand surprises him. She snaps – she snapped at _him_ – and turns her head from him out of rage.

It feels so weird – being so disconnected from her. Normally she’s the one telling him to calm down, normally they’re so in sync with each other – but for the first time, Raylan sees what Aella can be: dangerous, unrestrained, wild, uncontrollable. She’s…frightening.

 _Calm down,_ he practically begs.

She doesn’t respond to him, not for a long while, not even after she stops fighting with him.

People are tending to him, paramedics having been called. Dickie’s gone to the hospital and the paramedic is trying to convince him to go, tending to the head wound, but Raylan pays them no mind. He stares Aella down, calling out for her, trying to reach out to her with his mind, but she won’t even look at him. She says nothing, not to the paramedic’s golden lab daemon, not to him, nothing. She’s dead silence and he hates it. Even on the ride home, she says nothing, just stares out the window, and he says nothing to her out of frustration.

“You scared me,” Raylan tells her when he sits down on his bed.

“I’m a wolf, Raylan,” Aella bites out. “I’m dangerous. What else did you expect?”

She sleeps on the floor that night, which upsets him more than he’ll ever admit.

 

**Author's Note:**

> givens family:
> 
> raylan givens - black grey wolf - aella: means "whirlwind" in greek  
> arlo givens - black rottweiler - mara: means "bitter"  
> francis givens - orange classic tabby cat - cemil: means "kindness"  
> helen givens - black and white honey badger - ezekial: means "god strengthens", had symbolic visions that predicted the restoration of the kingdom of israel
> 
> others:
> 
> boyd crowder - reddish grey fox - athaliah: means "afflicted with yahweh" in hebrew, name of the daughter of ahab and jezebel that later became the queen of judah  
> winona hawkins - ocelot - charon: means "fierce brightness" in greek  
> miami deputy chief dan grant - bobcat - fallon: means "leader"  
> dickie bennet - black and grey raccoon - mahlah: means "weak" or "sick"


End file.
